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About Me

Here
I would love to share with you our travels and adventures as international
consultants. About living in Italy, the Veneto area near Venice; in Indonesia,
central Java. Why we love the southeast of the United States and moved back from
Italy. Our love for gardening, the botanical way. Sharing with you our manifold
treasures from exotic places and even offering several in my Mariette's Back to
Basics LLC Boutique, for others to enjoy. As well as high end silver items from
Giovanni Raspini, Italy |
google.com/+MariettesBacktoBasics

I
also do classes and consulting... too much to list here! Check out my google.com/+MarietteVandenMunckhofVedderABOUT page, where you see my other LINKS and email address; you just scroll down.Thanks!

Love to
bring back some romance and quality to the daily life of others...

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Saturday evening, we had a dinner for six friends at our home. Just like to share with you my table setting. From husband Pieter, I had a dozen white roses and in our garden we just found enough Fragrant double Obdam narcissus for putting in the individual Delft white picture frames, as a place setting. We had heavy rain on Saturday but inside it was cozy.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Due to enormous amounts of rain over the past couple of days, we have a full and wild creek running through our property. The bridges had been elevated, as we learned from previous raging waters. So far, so good. Pieter took some photos with the iPhone.

Let's have a look at our wild creek...

This is our newest bridge, close to the road as you see. Husband Pieter finished it just before Valentine's Day in 2012.

It looks more like a lake now and over the years this has grown in diameter a lot by raging water swirls.

Branches and all kind of things get to travel down the creek.

Looking from across the bridge towards the house...

Showing our center bridge as well...

This shows the two bridges.

In the end you also see the first bridge; we got three in total.

Lots of rain but it would be far better if it came over several weeks instead of a couple of days.

Monday, February 25, 2013

On December 14 of 2011, I did wear this newly purchased cotton coat from Costco, together with my linen plaid skirt. Again this year on February 10, I was wearing shades of gray for winter... Pantyhose from the Wolford Outlet: +Wolford @ Woodbury Commons Premium Outlets, Central Valley, NY 1-845-928-5818 for a great discount!

There also is a Wolford Outlet at Orlando Premium Outlets at Vineland Ave.

Sunday, February 24, 2013

However frail, our Pearlbush is showing some flowers again. We had such damage after the hot and dry summer of 2011, that we are glad some shrubs did even survive.

Our Pearl BushExochorda racemosais one of them. In a previous post by me from March 2011, you can see lovely photos with more blossoms, together with real pearls. Just click on the link below this post. The above link goes to Woodlanders where it is still available for sale.

Photo taken on Wednesday, February 20.

Look at the beautiful blue sky as a stark contrast with this lovely Pearl Bush blossom and buds.

Those buds do resemble pearls!

Another blossom almost completely opened up.

Leaves also start to come...

Love the special sunlight playing inside this perfect tip with buds...

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Today I will show you the final room of our Rose Suite; husband Pieter's Work Shop. A handyman like him, needs such a place! It is also my shipping center for any sales from my Zen Cart powered on line boutique Mariette's Back to Basics. So have a look with me and than we're done with the entire tour of Our Rose Suite. Previous posts you will find below.

Yes, it is written on the door...

At first, husband Pieter left this floor just as it was; concrete without tiles.

Finally after one-and-a-half year he did go ahead and put in the very same Spanish Volcano beige tiles as for the entire Rose Suite's flooring.

Easy to clean now and it is a very neat room!

My Dad, together with Pieter did lay these tiles! That was in October of 2005, when we'd given Mom & Dad a ticket to come to the USA with us. It was the last time that they visited us, since Mom is on dialysis we can no longer invite them over as she is not able to travel.

Boxes are also being stored here for world wide shipping of any sales from my Zen Cart powered on line boutique: Mariette's Back to Basics.

This is also my shipping center and husband Pieter does take care of that part.

All my loyal customers worldwide now know where it is being packed for shipping.

Yes, here too we do have the same TRINITY EcoStorage™ NSF 6-Tier Wire Shelving Racks on wheels from Costco, as in our Pantry (see link below). They are super and make the room very light as they are not solid.

Also for the time being I keep my photo albums here till I get them all digitalized.

Scanning the slides and than checking off the photos... Quite a task but one day it will be done!

Do you have a work shop in your home? Or is it outside of the home in a separate building?

Wednesday, February 20, 2013

As bloggers we love to get followers, comments and whatever social media connection we are participating in.

But HOW can we measure the OUTPUT?

Surely we CAN measure this and I will show you here with some examples at random, to also make clear that a high NUMBER of FOLLOWERS is often very deceiving! Bare with me till the very end; you will be in for quite a surprise!

Loyal readers cannot be lured in temporarily, by feeding them just emotion-centered content.

The Experts call that style: The vampire blogger.

A dangerous way for being emotion centered and selfish. Love the last line by Clay Morgan in his: The Undead Guide to Killing your Blog: then your online career will be in its twilight faster than Dracula can flap his cape...

Some writers are just brilliant with their words and it comes across rather clear; don't you think?

She does have great and genuine content at times, all of her own but she too knows how to borrow content and ideas from big websites.

Again; Google knows how to spot when anyone uses thin or scraped content.Another issue is that she seldom does comment on other bloggers posts anymore.

I gave up on her because of that as it cannot be a one-way event. Sad fact as Delores did help me out in June of 2010, when I was as green as they come in blogging. She pointed me to a tutorial for creating the widget to have others take it with them, off your side bar. That was mighty sweet!

Don't you agree with me?

There is Katysue from Good Life of Design who obviously no longer uses her Google Friend Connect but she ranked very high with her Copy & Paste blogging style and very vague source linking (just mentioning it is from Pinterest and such).

But Google KNOWS that certain people are plagiarizing and they make it show up in their site search as you see above; Katysue yields only 847.

Another blogger is Bella from Bellas Rose Cottage with quite a high number of followers; 1464 in total.

She long abandoned my blog and never ever did comment, contrary to the beginning.

Sure, speaking seven languages does make my horizon a little bit bigger but most bloggers do have a Google translate button so you too can visit more 'out of the box' so to speak.

Dear Elisabeth from Elisabeth Welt does yield astonishingly high with the site search: A MEGA 7,810!

So how come that Elisabeth's World (translated from German) scores THIS high?

One thing I know for sure; she is the MOST LOYAL COMMENTER in the blogger world and she posts very frequent, short posts, not those BORING long text stories that nobody has time to read.

We scan the Internet; we don't READ on the Internet.

Hah, lesson learned...?!

Elisabth also is following the COMMENT- DIALOGUE instead of the Monologue theory; she does REPLY to comments!

Another fabulous blog that I have had on my side bar for quite a while is: Fashion.

Sarah does have 1,249 followers.

Sarah also yields very high with her outstanding blog Fashion; 22,600!

You ought to check out those outstanding blogs and think twice about running like lemmings after something that IS NOT...

Okay, both my husband and I have done a lot of analyzing during our years as international mushroom consultants. I still like to do this. It teaches you how to read between the lines, how to detect genuine material from pretentious plagiarized material.

Somebody else did the work by making excellent photos and big deal you write a blog post about it.

Or those that use others' suffering as an emotion-centered bait for their blogs.

We all ought to recognize and promote other bloggers as well. It is not only about us.

On my sidebar I have always put some fledgling bloggers, to help them being exposed to a larger audience.

Certainly I would have appreciated that myself in my beginning period.

Under my Blogger Tips, you still can find several tutorials with Blogger Tips.

Use them as you please, that is my little contribution of Making Meaning.

What is your opinion about this google site search result?

Were you surprised by the outcome?

Love to hear your thoughts!

PS for Ria from the blog It’s Me this photo of her site search which
did yield 708 for her 1120 followers and not 6,070 as she mentioned in her comment below. Follow the
Google Webmaster guidelines by logging in to google.com and then type: site:...
fill in your blog name only, as shown in above examples, leaving the http:// off. We have to compare
apples with apples!